SIMON: What’s up everyone, Captain Blair here. We are at University of Florida Whitney Labs here in St. Augustine and we’re going to be checking out our first million and a half clams for the Indian River clam restoration project. Y'all come on check this out, this is pretty cool. So Jose what are we looking at in these tanks right here?
JOSE: What we have here is we call down wetters. The water is pumped by air, suction, and is moving through the screen. And this is the screen that has holes depending on the size of the clams. You see the water can go through. These are the smaller clams. These are the ones that are not growing that fast. It's ok, you can take a look. They look like sand. And that’s the smallest ones we have so far. They’re the same age as the larger ones I’m going to show you.
SIMON: Oh so this is all, this whole tank is...
JOSE: They’re the same spawn. We spawn all of the clams together because we want to have a good genetic pool and those clams are the ones we’re going to be raising in here. And then from here, we’re going to move down to show you how they look when they’re bigger. And in this case they're no longer in down wetters and trays and these trays are the ones that allow the water to flow freely and that’s why they get the algae that is suspended in the water. And you can see they’re a little bigger now.
SIMON: But these are the exact same spawn as...
JOSE: Same age, different size.
SIMON: Get big.
JOSE: Yep! And then, what we have here I’ll show you these are the larger ones. And all these clams are going to go to the field today. They’re going to start growing in the marsh.
SIMON: How many are estimated in here?
JOSE: Probably about 15 thousand right here in this tray and the other tray is probably about 25 thousand and in total in the whole facility right here we have maybe 1.2 - 1.3 million clams.
SIMON: That is pretty cool.